There's the Rub
It's Amazing to Be a Working Mom in France — Unless You Want a Job
Slate
There’s nothing new about comparing global policies pertaining to working parents, particularly when it comes to working mothers. But Claire Lundberg, a 30-something mother of an 18-month-old who moved from the U.S. to France two years ago, found that the glorious-sounding parental leave laws in the European nation are just that — the reality is much more complicated. True, France “has both the highest birth rate in Europe and one of the highest percentages of women in the workforce,” offering generous four-month-long maternity leaves. But upon further research — and an interview that involved her being grilled about her child-care arrangements and plans to have more kids — it turned out there was a lot Lundberg didn’t know about France as an alleged beacon of employment equality. In a 2010 survey, for example, only 25% of French employers said they were “strongly interested in hiring mothers,” and 41% feared there would be “less flexibility in the schedules of mothers who worked” (they didn’t have this fear when it came to men). There are a whole bunch of other statistics that echo this, and anecdotes about what’s called “mise au placard” — when working mothers are frozen out of jobs by being stripped of responsibilities until they inevitably quit. So is there a balance that can be reached for working moms? And would Lundberg have had better opportunities if she had stayed in the U.S.? “I don’t want to live (or pay taxes) in a country with a busted safety net,” she writes, “but I also don’t want that safety net to make the workplace so calcified that there’s little mobility.”